Hasn’t this become the norm not in extremis? 3Cdo and 16AAB deploying to Afghanistan showed more than anything that the Army is already short of line infantry without these cuts.

Did I mention the barstewards have done for me country regiment?

Reading about artillery, engineers, signals… I have come to the same conclusion
” I think we’ll see large shadow units that are designed to deliver 2 uplifts every 48 months and the regular unit will have a skeleton squadron that will basically induct the reservists like a conscript unit.”
- ie. leaving the intervention 16X and RM aside, the army is sized for 3+2

Any reading of the two bde-level intel formations
- is it just a “centre of excellence” type of concentration for peace time?

As for kit I imagine they have assumed that no more than HERRICK levels of CS would be needed so a FR Sqn, a BRF, an artillery battery and GMLRS troop plus the PM units which would fall in on in theatre kit.

It all seems sensible. And the TA structure and mission set is becoming more fleshed out. For example whole TA logistic regiments will be needed for the 2 follow on AF Bdes.

Good question – where do the defence planning assumptions meet in the middle ?

1 “large” operation of short duration (up to a division ?) Winds down but turns into an enduring operation (of a brigade)……..

So what happens if the need all three RF briagdes for the theatre entry than then becomes an enduring operation? That gives the RF 12 months before someone has to come back into theatre. Even with just two brigades going in initially, that still doesn’t provide enough time to avoid a breach?

2 logistic regiments
3 force logistics regiments
2 theatre logistics regiments
Plus maybe a pioneer regiment and a few odds and sods

There will be a five brigade roulement, 3 reaction force brigades and 2 AF. Presumably the TA units shadowing the regular AF will be large enough for a fresh tranche every 24 months to meet the one in five TA tour harmony guidelines.

It seems there is a regular structure for 5 brigades (there’s 5 engineer regiments, 5 REME etc) so I guess that either the shadow unit will be drawn upon to raise the uplift in the AF or the regular unit will have direct command of a reserve squadron or company. I think we’ll see large shadow units that are designed to deliver 2 uplifts every 48 months and the regular unit will have a skeleton squadron that will basically induct the reservists like a conscript unit.

Nice article matey ! Well written, ta very much

The biggest gap info for me at the moment, apart from fleshing out the Reserves plan, is the future of the Royal Artillery capabilities.

That too. The relevant part of the Pitt Report into the floodings:

“12.137 The Review has been advised by the
MoD that the use of CCRFs was considered but
that it would have taken longer to mobilise the
CCRFs than it would to deploy regular forces
to the scene. Since time was of the essence,
regular Armed Forces personnel were used.
Further, after the first 24 hours the majority
of the work undertaken by the Armed Forces
required specialist skills which the CCRFs did
not have – for example engineering skills to
construct semi-permanent flood defences and
logistics specialists for the distribution of water
supplies. Finally, any reserve personnel in the
local area may have had other responsibilities
in the community which would have been lost if
they had been called up.”

My impression, based on links to SJC, was that CCRF wasnt touched due to confusion over the lead in times for actually mobilising reservists. CCRFs were simply a means to save the last 15 TA Inf Bns.

We should not forget that the reason budgets are tight is because we live in an amazingly peaceful world, Yes there are threats but in the vast majority of cases these are small scale and a problem not just for us but for the international community. We have to get out of the world police man ethos that see’s us over commit to operations like the stan.

I really think UK civilian emergency planning should not rely on the Army what so ever. Even in the worst of issues. Between Health and the Police force they get nearly 5 times more than defence, not to mention what local authorities get. Having a military fall back just lest these organisations get away with shirking their responsibilities.

As with the Navy, the department of agriculture and fisheries pays for the fishery protection squadron, If local Authorities, the police and NHS want military support from reservists then they should have to pay for it.

Any British soldier deploying on the streets of the UK should be bricking it from the legal ramification’s if they are put into a position of having to exercise force. Even the police in this country get sued and charged for skelping a few heads at anti globalisation riots.

But above all, it would be so foreign, the idea wouldn’t stick. They do the Police job, fund the Police. Or get them to stop moaning.

And the OP quotes a Telegraph article which interestingly says,

“Significantly, there have been no cuts this time to the Gurkhas. Throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, Britain had the vast reserves of the Indian Army on which to call: troops from India and what is now Pakistan fought in both world wars and in many a colonial campaign. The Gurkhas, a relic of that pool of manpower, have recently filled gaps with the so-called Gurkha Reinforcement Companies. The prospects for a young Nepali who reaches enlistment age in 2018, therefore, still look sound.”

As the OP speculates there could be more to keeping the mountain men than politics.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie

There should be better use of the Regular Reserve I agree, but this has been an argument since 1939 and before. There doesn’t seem to have been any will to incorporate Regular Reservists in a more organised sense or any mechanism to allow them to train on a regular basis with their old unit.

Tapping into Regular Reservists is definitely a way of uplifting regular and TA units but I believe it would take some re-jigging of the RFA 1996 to accomplish this.

I could see their being scope for reaction force units to be at nearly full strength and then a sliding scale of needing individuals to uplift to needing TA to uplift to needing TA to provide a sub unit and then needing regular reserves and TA to provide a sub unit.

Too different. If say the modern Briton despised the French as much as our ancestors (the ruling elites of which probably spoke French….) then I don’t think filling the ranks of the TA would be much of a problem. The defence budget would be bigger too because it would be further up the agenda. But because we don’t have a threat on our doorstep defence becomes an existential issue. Nobody cares about defence……

There has been, for decades, this immense and almost irresistible urge by local authorities to abdicate their planning roles in the fields of basic necessities and ask the Army to do it since it provides these basics relatively effortlessly and local authorities don’t have to fund these. Why should they fund it all when its rarely needed and the Armed Forces are there, and can do it better than they ever could. A fair point in some ways but there are three big problems:

(a) constitutional issues, these are not the trivial matter people think. We are having a very old problem rearing its head over the GBAD being placed on tower blocks in London, namely the effective force billeting of troops on civilians. I know they are not living in their flats but it is a similar argument and a similar problem.

(b) the armed forces exist to fight, there is no guarantee that the Army units in a local authority area will be there when needed.

(c) the civilians do not understand how the Army works or understand its capabilities. You can blame the Army for that but then why educate local authorities if you are not meant to be their get out of jail free card. So civilian emergency practioners have some pretty wild ideas about the Army’s capabilities. For example, looking at a TA field hospital in their area and thinking that there is a fully kitted out, 200 bed field hospital waiting to be sprung and deployed and be operational in 24 hours.

I don’t think the reserves will play much of a role. They have tried this with the CCRFs and they have proved to be completely and utterly useless. They had the perfect opportunity to use them in 2007 when the flooding needed labour to build defences around the substation and they brought in regulars since mobilising the TA was such a ball ache and most of them were better off in their civilians posts. I really hope they have learned their lesson.

Also, another factor is that the Army likes to remain relevant, if it grubs up some extra missions then it can justify certain force structures, we have GBAD in London when for some time GBAD has looked a tempting and low lying fruit for people looking to save money. The Army needs to be careful that by offering to integrate itself more into emergency planning they do not turn into a local authorities humanitarian aid agency which is what a lot of local government think they are, especially wonderful since they don’t come from their budget.

While I do not dispute your argument (that it is a bad idea), I am simply suggesting that MoD may have decided that with more reserves they should be used for an emergency planning role – as it seems strange that they should have new strategy which reverses the break between the Army and emergency planning recently established in the same plan where they intend to double the size of the reserves – while it might be an extrapolation to far I cannot help but think it is linked. After all, it’s not like deploying troops in an emergency is a vote winner, and while doing so might help hide the fact that they have also cut the police to the bone, unless we attach all the reserves to the RMP, the Reserves can only carry-out roles in a emergency planning situation where bodies on the ground are needed, and no doubt you still need to send one or more police officer along with them to baby sit them – so less than ideal from a point of view of addressing lack of police numbers in civil disaster scenario.

Of course the re-emergence of the emergency planning role might simply be some sort of bone for either the Tory or LibDem back-benchers.